I agree, but...

what about social responsibility.

I sometimes think that information is a little too easy to get hold of these days, I can look on the internet and learn to make bombs etc with little or no knowledge. No apprenticeship, no period of learning, very little actual effort.

A counter to this argument is that if you really wanted to make a bomb you get the information from somewhere else anyway.

A lot of instructors will withold information not because of any social responsibility but because they want to keep things to themselves and hold knowledge over their students. There are few instructors who will actually tell you how to defeat them (or how to improve to challange them more).

I agree with MP that students should not be expected to perform menial tasks, they should be able to learn something useful from day 1, should they have immediate access to everything? In my opinion; no. I believe we have a duty to the members of the public to, as far as we are able, to discern the "honour" of our students. To those whose intentions or character we see failings in we should be careful what it is we teach them and in extreme circumstances we should refuse to teach them at all.

In days gone by a students character was perhaps tested through the performance of menial tasks but then the student probably did not pay for instruction as we do today but by providing for the instructor things such as food or some goods he might produce.

There seems little reason to carry on with this tradition today within our capitalist society. I suspect the majority who perpetuate this tradition do so out of a sense of getting something for nothing as opposed to any real test of the student.

Bear